Excerpt:
It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3 [of the Fourteenth Amendment]. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”
In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.
This is a fairly easy read for the legal layperson, and the best general overview I’ve seen yet that sets forth the various legal and constitutional factors involved in today’s decision, including the concurring dissent by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson.
It’s like the Supreme Court thinks it can supersede the constitution because it thinks the ammendment was poorly worded/thought out. cough cough second ammendment cough cough
It’s been a shit show since day one with this court. If there’s ever been a time to pack the court it is now. Hell, do it in response to this ruling. Allowing an insurrectionist on the ballot is plain unacceptable. We’re already heading toward discourse we cannot solve. Make a stand, would someone?
Edit: Just clarifying it’s the Supreme Court who doesn’t think it has to adhere to the language in the amendment. Not myself.
I thought I read that the decision was unanimous. If the liberals and conservatives on the court agree, it seems unlikely that packing the court would change the decision.
Also, as much as I’d love to see Trump excluded from ballots, we all know that states like Texas would turn around and do the same to Biden, just out of spite. It would change the nature of democracy, in a bad way, if individual states could just randomly decide to exclude candidates they don’t like. Heck, what would stop them from excluding ALL candidates of a particular party, except perhaps some token losers or quislings no one ever heard of?
The liberals dessented by essentially saying the law should be “self executing” (a fucking joke) in that if he was part of an insurrection then he’s just as ineligible as a 30 year old running for president. You simply can’t run if you’re under 35, so in some fantasy reality those judges live in Trump just wouldn’t be able to be on the ballots automatically, as if no one has to actually ENFORCE that law (see: judges actions in removing him)
It’s astounding how utterly deranged our laws are.
Trump has well earned the name “Teflon Don.”
The ONLY thing that man has not lied about is “I could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any supporters (and he’d walk away into the sunset with 0 repercussions whatsoever)”
The liberals dessented
They most certainly did not. The liberal justices wrote concurring opinions. They very explicitly did not write dissenting opinions.
Too many people in here making lawful good arguments. you’ll always lose to lawful evil. try being neutral good instead. i think the current times even call for being chaotic good.
No mention of the Court’s reasoning that it should not be enforced at the State level, but instead at the Federal level?
SCOTUS is clearly making unconditional rulings. The states should go nuclear and ignore them. Let SCOTUS enforce its decisions.
The states should go nuclear and ignore them.
If we’re not already there, it’s certainly where we are headed.
If a state government decides to ignore a SCOTUS ruling – because that’s all the rage these days – what’s the government going to do, call out the National Guard?
I personally don’t know the answer to that these days, but it’s certainly happened before, and in my lifetime: Kennedy called out the National Guard when Gov. George McGovern of Alabama decided he didn’t want to honor the SCOTUS ruling to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education.
The only difference is that that particular ruling was almost 10 years old by the time McGovern got into office on an election promise of no segregation, so any possible excuses or mitigating factors for his grandstanding on the subject were already long gone, if they ever existed. Kennedy called his bluff, and it was the right call.
I don’t see Biden doing that before completely exhausting every other possible alternative first. But you never know, he might go full Dark Brandon on such a governor. It’s a complete tossup, IMO.
The much vaunted checks and balances mean nothing when the SC is corrupt
This was a unanimous decision
It wasn’t. 5 said the text means the opposite of what it says. Four said enforcing it is up to the federal courts, not state courts. Two wildly different opinions with the only thing in common being overturning the state ruling.
Also, i thought states were given the right to determine their own ballot rules.
Or is that mute because this is a federal election?
It’s not moot at all. Until this ruling, states did indeed determine their own ballot rules for ALL elections, federal or not.
The Constitution specifically leaves presidential elections to the states, specifying only the details of the Electoral College. There are additional specifications in the Constitution for senators and congressmen. Within these guidelines states have always run their own state and local elections as they please, since the late 1700s.
But after this ruling, states still do determine their own ballot for all elections, EXCEPT for anything to do with the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment. If I understand it correctly, that is now up to Congress and Congress alone, but only IF Congress feels like it in any given case.
If you think that’s nonsensical, well, you’re in good company.
Defund the Supreme Court.
Can’t, they’ll just get their funding elsewhere.
Oh, wait . . . some of them already are.
God, I hate this timeline. Why couldn’t we get the cool dystopian one.
I was really hoping for zombies, instead we get fascism and climate apocalypse.
It’s not inconsistent with the court’s inconsistency though.
Scalia was a legal juggernaut on the bench and off it, as unfortunate his politics may be, he had a very large influence on the legal arena surrounding Constitutional law. He argued (correctly) for separated powers and the legislature doing the legislation on big and controversial topics instead of the court(s) - openly pointing out SCotUS’s composition as an unelected, politically appointed technocracy.
What changed and grew was the inconsistency of the conservative members at respecting that separation of powers whilst also not shying from their role as final legal arbiter. Trump v Anderson was correctly decided that states cannot deny candidates federal ballot access without due process, but they completely neglected to affirm or deny the lower courts ruling of what counts as attempted insurrection, kicking that to Congress.
This is political cowardice, not good and proper separated powers keeping each other in check. A legal case is the correct route to determine facts surrounding a candidates eligibility - not a political disqualification process without precedent nor established rules regarding evidentiary eligibility, rights of the accused, composition of the adjudicators, etc. any attempt to disqualify via US Congress will spurn a host of new legal challenges based on procedural questions
Trump v Anderson was correctly decided that states cannot deny candidates federal ballot access without due process
I could live with the specific addition of requirement of due process if that was all they did, but as you correctly noted, that’s NOT what we’re left with.
I’d forgotten about Scalia’s influence on all this as well. Yours is an excellent comment, thank you for taking the time to write it.
This is political cowardice, not good and proper separated powers keeping each other in check.
That is democracy, they have to rule based on the law, and they err on the side of innocence. I think a court that prefers for the elected people to make policy decisions instead of them is better than a court that sets its own policy.
There is no side of innocence in determining eligibility for office. The requirements laid out in the main body of the Constitution already make it clear that holding the office of President is not an inalienable right.
Absolutely, it’s insane that congress passed an ammendment that said a thing and now the Supreme Court is saying “no, it doesn’t say that thing, if you wanted that to apply you’d need to pass a congressional act on a case by case basis.”
Imagine if everytime someone committed tax fraud congress had to officially vote to investigate that specific person. Imagine if a country like America was unable to delegate any powers.
It’s because they don’t actually care what the constitution or the bill of rights or any of the amendments says. The Tribunal of Six only cares about ensuring their political compatriots - that is, the GOP - can cement their power for good. And if that means that we sink into fascism… they don’t care. Because they’ll be calling the shots.
“Insane” is the perfect word. There is no possible way these justices had no idea what the framers meant and didn’t mean, what the Tenth Amendment reservation of powers to the states means, or what the Fourteenth Amendment is about . . . and if they didn’t know (cough John Roberts cough) it’s because they didn’t want to know, or were paid enough (cough Clarence Thomas cough) to temporarily feign ignorance.
I said this in another comment elsewhere, but the dissenting concurrence from the three liberal judges is so strong, and the effort to appear as a “unified front” so blatant, I really got the impression there was some strong-arming behind the scenes to get to this semblance of unanimity when the details are anything but. This was confirmed for me later when I read in The Guardian that this ruling was issued “per curiam” which is not default for a unanimous SCOTUS decision, but must be specifically designated by the court.
These justices knowingly chose to turn part of the Constitution upside down, maybe in a misguided sense thinking they’re preventing civil chaos but instead just punting it down the line and making it even worse. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is the new reality.
Has Trump actually been found guilty of insurrection? It seems this could be where the issue lies. I know he’s an insurrectionist, you know he is an insurrectionist but unless convicted how do you apply the law?
It requires no conviction.
So… what’s to stop a Texas or a Mississippi or a Florida from deciding that Biden has participated in an insurrection, and requiring no conviction, uses this as grounds for removal from the ballot in November?
As much as I want Trump off ballots and believe he’s an insurrectionist, it’s important to remember that anything that can be done to hamper his chances that requires no (or a low bar) legal framework can also be done to help his chances.
If a court in Colorado can sit down and decide he’s off the ballot because of their opinions, and that decision is enforceable and unassailable, then we’re establishing that a state court can strike any name from any ballot because they say so.
With that precedent, I would fully expect states with GOP leadership to appoint judges who would then find reasons to call some aspect of Biden’s presidency an insurrection (in a similar vein as the Mayorkas impeachment), and remove him from their state’s ballot.
Literally nothing. If they were able to they would do it already, in several cases they are kind of half-assedly trying. Mutually assured destruction isn’t the principle of operation when one side is generally acting in good faith and the other side is actively pulling the copper out of the walls.
